[moocowduckquack]

I thought about this a couple of years back and as far as I can make out, we are approaching the situation where you could just about fit a digitised general engineering factory and materials store into a high street shop unit. At that point you could robotically fabricate a car to order and just drive it out the front onto the street when it is finished.

[return0]

But isn't China's advantage the established (and efficient?) chain of materials supply, logistics along with the availability of cheap labor when needed?

[polskibus]

It's about having your supply chain as close to your customer as possible so you can pull (as in lean) on demand. What then happens is the customers' needs iterate faster and faster and you need to keep up. Fit the 3d printer in the shop, print whatever the consumer needs in less then it takes to drink a cup of coffee and you're the winner. Of course you need to make sure you have enough raw materials. That's something China has to import a lot. So unless China builds up domestic demand to much higher levels, western countries will gain more from 3d printing than China.

[wlievens]

Cars have ridiculously much electronics in them and you cannot "print" those just like that in a small shop. Have you seen how big wnd expensive a wafer fab is?

[moocowduckquack]

I have seen what people are developing. Besides, cars do not need to have micro electronics.

http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap

http://medtechinsider.com/archives/24967

http://www.nthdegreetech.com/printed-semiconductors.php

That said, there will always be some things for which economies of scale win out against customisation, and I suspect that many electronics components are in that bracket. Luckily we have things like FPGAs, so you don't need to keep a huge stock of specialised chips to make a wide variety of devices.

[mitochondrion]

What's preventing all of those electronics from becoming dumb terminals and abstracting everything away to the central processing unit?

[adamnemecek]

Presumably you don't have to "print" all parts there.

[2stop]

... So there is just a never ending supply of raw material also sitting in this high street shop?

[moocowduckquack]

You keep a stock of base materials and things like chips that you can't fabricate onsite.

Is the same as keeping stock for a normal shop, you keep track of what is being used and order more when it gets low.

[mikeash]

They just get a hookup to the Feed, of course.